Sailesh Kolanu should sit back, rethink and calibrate. No more halfbaked rotta movies please.

I have always admired that Sailesh chose to pursue filmmaking even after earning a PhD. I know some of his batchmates from undergrad, so I have loosely followed his journey. When HIT1 released, it felt refreshing. It was a solid whodunnit, a genre that Tollywood rarely executes well apart from exceptions like Agent Sai. I was genuinely rooting for him and went into HIT2 first day first show with a lot of excitement. The film was okay at best. It did not land as strongly as HIT1, but I still wanted to give him the benefit of doubt as he was building a larger universe.

Then came Saindhav. Friends who watched it told me it was terrible, so I skipped it.

In late April, I happened to be on a flight from Chennai to Hyderabad. Sailesh was seated next to us. From the moment he boarded till takeoff, and again after landing until deboarding, he was constantly on the phone. He was passionately discussing how Saindhav failed because of poor editing, how he did not want HIT3 to face the same fate, and how this film would rewrite the Tollywood box office. Listening to how confident and driven he sounded, I felt he might have cracked it this time.

I finally watched both Saindhav and HIT3 recently. To be honest, I do not know what to say. Saindhav felt flat. There was no real emotional connect with the characters, and the narrative was not engaging. HIT3 leaned too much into violence and did not feel like it belonged to the same HIT universe that started with so much promise.

It feels like Sailesh starts with an interesting sliver of an idea, possibly from Reddit or Instagram, and tries to stretch it into a full-length film without going deep into research or developing the technical and narrative layers. The ideas are interesting on paper, but they lack the depth and internal logic that a good thriller needs. That is the frustrating part. He is clearly smart and talented, but it feels like he is not putting in the work to build richer, better crafted stories that can deliver on their potential.

From what I understand, he has a 7 HIT movie deal with Nani, so I hope he recalibrates and comes back strong with HIT4. Would hate to see Karthi's potential go waste.